There’s going to be dozens of players left out in the cold at next week’s NBA draft, players who will not hear their names called by the time the night is over.
Udonis Haslem knows how they’ll feel.
He also may be the example they’ll need.
Undrafted in 2002, Haslem — a Miami native who has spent his entire NBA career with his hometown Miami Heat — has been in the league longer than just about any other active player. He’s planning and hoping to sign this summer to return for a 16th season, something that was not only unlikely but unthinkable after every team passed when given the chance to secure his services through the draft.
“My mind works differently,” Haslem said. “I know when one door closes, another door opens. That’s the way it’s always been for me.”
Mido has been talking with refreshing candour for an hour, explaining why he predicted Mohamed Salah would be 10 times as good as Raheem Sterling, accepting he was a selfish player who could be difficult to handle, and praising Gareth Southgate for his transformation since the days when he would “panic” as Middlesbrough’s manager, yet the obvious and only place to start is with the Egyptian’s frank admission that he was staring death in the face unless he lost some weight.
It is an extraordinary story that resonates even more because Egypt are playing their opening World Cup match on Friday and Mido, who is only 35 years old, could quite feasibly have been lining up alongside Salah against Uruguay. Mido, however, retired from playing five years ago, after briefly falling out of love with football towards the end of a disappointing spell at Barnsley, and although he has rediscovered his affection for the game through coaching, the former Tottenham striker has clearly been through quite an ordeal with his health.
“I was 150kg and I reached a point where I couldn’t walk 30 yards,” Mido says. “If I did, I started to feel pain in my back, my joints and my knees. I remember I was getting off my boat in Egypt five months ago – this day is the turning point in my life – and I was walking off on to an island. I had three friends with me and it was 300 yards to the end of the island. The sand was a bit heavy and it was a bit sunny and I said to them: ‘I cannot walk.’ I had to sit for 30 minutes. I was only 34. That was the moment the switch flicked.
What leadership and organizational behaviors would you like to change?
I had the great good fortune in 2010 to spend a week with the Dalai Lama on his tour, supporting him behind the scenes as he interacted with thousands of people. One of the things he likes to say is “recognition is liberation.” When we see, when we recognize, when we increase our self-awareness and awareness of others, then we are liberated — we are free to take a new path. Thanks to Kim Scott’s work, Radical Candor is a tool that enables us to offer feedback and empower behavior changes in all our interactions.
Some people find the word radical a little scary. Yet radical means you take the leap and have the courage to say the stuff that you were thinking anyway. And you say it within a framework that is emotionally sensitive and considerate.
McKinsey & Company; Aaron De Smet, J.R. Maxwell and Ryan Harper from
… Cross-cutting decisions differ from delegated choices by an individual or team and from less frequent big-bet decisions such as an acquisition that impacts an organization broadly. Treating them the same is a big mistake since decisions that cut across the organization are made by different groups as part of a collaborative process.
Thus, the process is more important than the final decision-maker. Examples of cross-cutting decisions include pricing, sales and operations planning, and new product development. Organizations often struggle making them because of their inherent complexity with many steps, small decisions and people involved. The trick: Break the big decision down and design an effective process for making it.
… A dread task is an exceptionally bad case when the prediction is so painful, you can’t even properly contemplate what you need to do. For example: “I need to do my taxes… [ugh, hurts to think about that] when do I need them done by? [still in mental anguish]… can we think about anything else please?”
This is bad because starting a task and not completing it raises its future cost. Your brain models using past behavior. If you fail to execute the task, your brain will predict you’ll fail again. Which makes thinking about the issue emotionally draining. Which increases the odds of failure. A vicious cycle. Etc. Etc.
Thankfully, these predictions are frequently wrong. All you need to do is reverse engineer your thought patterns. Here are some strategies I find useful for tricking myself into doing what I need to do.
CBC Sports, The Canadian Press, Neil Davidson from
The advance in technology at the World Cup is evident in more than use of VAR (Video Assistant Referee). The 32 teams will have stats tablets to see in-game positional data on players and the ball.
It’s another tool in the analytics arsenal that top soccer teams are increasingly relying on.
“It’s natural. Analytics is so tied in with technology,” said Bret Myers, a Villanova professor who is an analytics consultant with MLS champion Toronto FC. “Why we have that term analytics is because of the data that technology can generate. In sports, in competition you want any kind of edge that you can get.”
SleepScore Labs — a joint venture between ResMed, Dr. Oz Media, and Pegasus Capital Advisors best known for its contactless, bedside sleep quality measurement device — has launched a new offering that relies only on the user’s smartphone.
The SleepScore App uses the phone’s speakers as a SONAR system by projecting inaudible soundwaves around the bedroom. Once these reflect off of the user’s sleeping body and are captured by the smartphone’s microphone, the app’s algorithms translate the readings into a one- to 100-point metric of sleep quality.
“Sleep affects all facets of people’s health, and yet there has been no easy way to accurately measure or track it everywhere we sleep — until now,” Colin Lawlor, CEO of SleepScore Labs, said in a statement. “We’ve been developing this technology longer than the iPhone has existed. We’re excited that for the first time, virtually everyone can get a truer picture of their sleep health for free and make smarter decisions about how to get a more restful night’s sleep.”
Because when Stefan Hoerzer is dealing with the planet’s best soccer players, he is focused. He has a job to do — and fawning plays no part in it. He would never behave like a fan.
“No, you shouldn’t,” says Hoerzer, laughing. “Obviously, they trust you as an expert. They trust you as being professional. You want to show, ‘I can help you. I’m here to help you perform at your best, to make you better.'” And Hoerzer — as senior manager athlete services for adidas in Nuremberg, Germany — is certainly qualified to do that. Footwear is his specialty.
“If one of the players has specific needs, whatever that might be, we are the department here that customizes the boots to these needs,” says Hoerzer. “We have different devices to measure feet. We also have different computer programs for how we analyze the data. Based on the data, we do our customization.”
Mental health disorders (MHD) in elite athletes is a topic that has received increased attention in recent years. The overall aim of this position statement is to enhance awareness of this important topic and to critically discuss optimal service provision for athletes who suffer from MHD. In the first part of the paper a short overview of the research on MHD in elite athletes is provided. Elite athletes seem to have comparable prevalence rates for the most common MHD when compared to non-athletic peers, but there are still many disorders that have not been investigated in athletes. Sport specific situations such as injuries, periods of overtraining and career termination may put athletes at an increased risk of developing MHD. In the second part of the paper, models of service provision for elite athletes suffering from MHD from six European countries are presented, focusing on 1) professional service providers, 2) support systems, 3) diagnostic assessment, 4) clinical treatment, 5) performance during treatment, 6) screening, and 7) education systems. It emerges that competencies, certification issues, and professional boundaries of the involved service providers, as well as the structure of the National Health Care systems differ strongly across European countries, which makes defining a golden standard difficult. In the third part of this paper, the authors provide general recommendations for athletes and coaches, clubs, federations, organizations and scholars that hopefully will inspire stakeholders to optimize their support systems. [full text]
Baltimore Sun, Jonas Shaffer and Talia Richman from
A day after the death of 19-year-old football player Jordan McNair, the University of Maryland athletic department said it is bringing in an “external group” to review whether team protocols were followed the day the Randallstown resident was hospitalized.
McNair, a redshirt freshman entering his second year on Maryland’s football team, died Wednesday, two weeks after collapsing during an organized team workout in College Park.
Maryland acting athletic director Damon Evans declined during a news conference Thursday to say who would perform the review. But he told reporters the university “will h
The 2017 NCAA Student-Athlete Substance Use Survey, developed by the NCAA’s research staff, provides the latest insights into the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco by student-athletes. The study, released in June 2018, shows college athletes continue to make healthier decisions in many areas than their peers in the general student body.
The Student-Athlete Substance Use Survey has been conducted every four years since 1985 to assess the health and well-being trends among student-athletes. The report helps inform NCAA policy-makers with both current and historical information concerning levels of student-athlete drug and alcohol use. The study also analyzes why student-athletes do or do not use specific substances, when they started to use drugs, and their attitudes regarding drug use and drug testing.
The NCAA announcing it will allow players to participate in up to four games in a season without burning their redshirt is a significant change that will leave many players and coaches thrilled.
Decades after the Cleveland Indians used a defensive shift against the slugger Ted Williams, Major League Baseball is inching closer to legislating against that stratagem. Rob Manfred, the sport’s commissioner, signaled on Thursday that there is growing momentum to regulate the shift, which has become the norm in baseball in recent years, in some fashion.
In a wide-ranging discussion during a break in this week’s owners’ meetings, Manfred said the competition committee, which regularly convenes during the meetings, discussed whether the time had come to “aggressively” move on managing defensive shifts. But he said the matter was still in the analysis and discussion stage and no changes are imminent.
My World Cup predictions and why they will be wrong
13, 06, 18
by Stefan Szymanski
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So with time on my hands I decided to join the bandwagon and produce some World Cup predictions. They will be hopelessly wrong.
The reason they will be wrong is that they are based on a statistical model that uses historical data to estimate the contributions of different factors to winning international games. That model is not very good- it can only account for about 30% of the variation in team performance. So most of what we’re interested in is unexplained.
So why bother? Because this model, as bad as it is, is probably not much worse than most of the other models out there. I hope someone like Roger Pielke Jr is going to do an analysis of forecasts after the event- these are usually illuminating.
Columbia Business School, Ideas and Insights, Stephen Kurczy from
Swiss bank UBS predicts that Germany will win the 2018 World Cup. Goldman Sachs is calling the tournament for Brazil. EA Sports expects France to take home the gold trophy.
Columbia Business School’s Michael Mauboussin has advice for even the most sophisticated of World Cup predictors: Expect an upset.
“In what sport do underdogs win more than others?” asks Mauboussin, an adjunct finance professor and author of The Success Equation, a book about the role of luck and skill in sports and business. “It happens a lot more often in soccer than in basketball.”